Interviewing the children, cont.

12/14/12 4:48 PM EST

What is the ethical way for TV reporters to approach interviewing children in the aftermath of a traumatic incident such as Friday’s shooting in Newtown, Connecticut?

Throughout the day, major cable and TV news channels interviewed a number of child eyewitnesses on-air. CNN replayed an affiliate’s on-camera interview with a third-grader as she recounted how she found out what happened that day at school and another interview with a young boy talking about hearing "lots of bangs" and "screaming" as his class moved to safety. On Fox News, an anchor conducted a telephone interview with an eight-year-old after first speaking with the child’s mother. MSNBC played video showing a young girl describing the experience of hearing “booming noises” and telling the reporter that “we didn’t scream, we started crying.”

After the interview with the young boy aired on CNN Friday afternoon, anchor Wolf Blitzer told viewers the network's policy for interviewing children in these circumstances.

"By the way, when we interview these young kids, we do it only, only with their parents’ permission," Blitzer said. "Their parents are there on the scene, we don’t talk to these young children unless the parents say they want the child to speak out and they’re there to watch these interviews. We’re very sensitive to the young children in these kinds of tragedies."

Bruce Shapiro, the executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, however, said he thinks conducting on-air interviews with children right after such a crisis is “irresponsible journalism.”

“I think that putting young children on air in the immediate aftermath of a tragedy like this is irresponsible in several dimensions,” Shapiro, a contributing editor at The Nation, told POLITICO. “First of all, look, as journalists we have a responsibility to get the informed consent of interview participants, under any circumstances. These are little kids who are in shock, who are in fear, who may be confused about what they have seen. And I think an interview like that can only add to the pressure on the child on a very difficult day.”

And it’s “unfair to news consumers” as well, Shapiro noted.

“These young children as witnesses may or may not have facts, may or not have facts accurately, and so much misinformation that gets communicated in the first hours after a mass shooting becomes the story, even when it’s wrong, that it misleads the public,” he said. “We’ve seen this again and again and again, with Columbine, at Virginia Tech and elsewhere – misleading information in the first few hours confuses the public about what happened and why.”

The way news organizations interviewed the children involved in today’s shooting “can’t contribute meaningful information at this point,” he added. Shapiro said he had one major ethical question as he watched the interviews on camera with children: “What were these reporters thinking?”

“I think there is a time and a place where you can interview children, circumstances in which they’re really protected,” Shapiro said. “But in these first minutes, what were these reporters thinking? I actually found it shocking. It’s one thing to speak to a child and say what did you see and attempt as a reporter to kind of assemble the story for yourself and how you’re going to tell it, but to put a child in the first moments after a terrifying ordeal on camera and ask them what were your thoughts as you were running past the school? It’s irresponsible journalism.”

Elana Newman, a psychology professor at the University of Tulsa who also serves as research director of the Dart Center, said journalists should consider “weighing the news value with the benefits of the audience” before interviewing a child.

“What is the news value of interviewing a child? Is it to get information? Is it to show a face for the story? If it’s to show a face for the story, then what do you really need to be asking?” she said.

There aren’t many journalists who interview kids regularly, and Newman suggested that there should be more reporters who work on that beat and get training to interview children in general.

“We don’t think about children as sources and we really need to have a conversation,” she said in an interview. “There’s the whole trauma reporting part of it, but then there’s the whole, how do you talk to a kid? When do you talk to a kid? When is a kid’s face important? When is it of value?”

The 24-hour news cycle unquestionably places major pressure on journalists to get interviews and pictures of the crisis to air immediately. But, Shapiro said, “it only hurts the credibility of news organizations with the public if reporters are pressed into obviously insensitive and irresponsible on camera interviews with children.”

“While I think it would be ethically questionable in any circumstance to interview when you’re trying to just grab on-air sound bites from victims fleeing a really terrifying scene, in really small children who are of an age where even the meaning of death is not clear to them — which is what you’re talking about with kindergarten, first grade kids — you really have to question what value anyone thinks these interviews, on-air, are going to hold,” he said.

From a clinical point of view, Dr. Steve Marans, a Yale psychiatry professor and the director of the National Center for Children Exposed to Violence, said interviewing a child after an overwhelming event “can actually add to burdens children are already experiencing.”

“And the bottom line is, if you think about all of the interviews you’ve seen of kids on the scene of terrible events, you notice how often some of them will talk and talk and talk? … There’s an attempt to repeat and to go over and over and over in an attempt to metabolize the experience. The problem is, when it’s done in a way that’s not in a clinical or therapeutic setting, it doesn’t serve that function. It actually overstimulates," Marans said.

“There is an exploitative quality to it, frankly,” he added.

And the question of the legitimate news value of the child’s report is important for a journalist to consider before putting them in front of a camera, Newman noted.

“Typically a journalist doesn’t have a responsibility to their source, but when it’s a minor, or I would also say when it’s a victim, there might be different kinds of responsibilities we have. And this enters a whole new way of thinking about journalism & reporting,” she said. “What is the purpose of having children’s reports? We know this is happening to children and the public want to understand, but what is the actual news value of what the kid says?”